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Quatermass and the Pit on Blu Ray

To paraphrase Russell Harty on Coronation Street, there was a time in my life before Quatermass but it didn’t amount to much. Quite what I did in those benighted years between 0 and 10 I’ll never know, but just before my 11th birthday in August 1979 everything finally clicked into place when my mum let me stay up late to watch Quatermass and the Pit on BBC2. As usual, my mum fell asleep long before the end (she even nodded off at the cinema during the climactic Death Star sequence in Star Wars!) leaving me to witness the near destruction of humanity by the Horned Beast all on my own. That kind of trauma made me the man I am today (repressed serial killer) but more importantly left me desperate to find out more about Quatermass. The next day my mum sensationally revealed that Quatermass was also a television series, and just a few weeks later I was staggered to discover that ITV (a channel I had forgotten about as it had been off the air due to a strike for two months) were going to transmit a sequel to it even though the last story was shown in the 1950s. I harboured a delusion that this had somehow all been done for my benefit, and when Arrow reprinted the original television scripts it seemed clear that me and this programme were just meant to be.

The fact that Mark Gatiss tells almost exactly the same story on one of the extras of Optimum Home Entertainment’s excellent new Blu-ray release of Quatermass and the Pit doesn’t make my relationship with the film feel any less special, and in fact over the years I’ve met many people of my age who went through exactly the same experience -- much like puberty. It’s comforting to think that in 1979, bookish and weedy boys all over the country were discovering Nigel Kneale’s work through this brilliant film adaptation.

I haven’t had a chance to see Quatermass and the Pit for a long while, and so not only does it have to compete with my lurid childhood memories of it, but it also has to contend with the original television version which, although once hard to access, has now been available on DVD for many years and is something I’ve watched an embarrassing number of times. It’s a relief then that the film really does live up to its reputation. Kneale’s script is particularly fine -- it condenses the original without, on the whole, sacrificing anything crucial, and Roy Ward Baker’s direction never puts a foot wrong. The possession scenes still look astonishing, and you wonder if the actors were at times genuinely fearful that at any moment a giant arc lamp or heavy cable would end their lives and prevent them spending their generous Hammer pay cheque. All the actors are great with the leads James Donald, Andrew Keir, Barbara Shelley and Julian Glover displaying an intensity and conviction throughout the film that is utterly convincing. Even the young Roj Blake -- Gareth Thomas -- puts on a good show when he finds something nasty behind the concrete.

There are only two significant problems with the film. Famously, the race memory footage of the Martians “cleansing the hive” looks absolutely terrible and it’s the only time in the film where you’re on Breen’s side. Quatermass seizes upon the footage as being proof of his theory and shows it as the clinching part of the argument. It gets dismissed within the story as looking unconvincing, when it’s also genuinely unconvincing in our terms, and this causes the film to sag noticeably. Aside from this, I find the ending problematic. This is partly because I’m so used to the original production which ends with a discussion in a television studio some weeks after the riots and with Quatermass’s ringing pronouncement that “We are the Martians.” The film version ends with Judd and Quatermass stunned by Ronay’s death and coming to terms with the events as London still burns around them. This could have been effective, but Shelley and Keir strike their only false note by playing the scene as if the two of them have just had a very bad dinner date, an effect which is only made worse by Baker’s choice of some undistinguished library music rather than more of Tristram Cary’s score. These are minor cavils though -- the film remains hugely enjoyable and thought-provoking throughout.

Optimum are to be congratulated on this Blu-ray version. The film looks sumptuous throughout and the disgusting Martian green slime has surely never before looked so dazzlingly disgusting. My only minor comment is that some of the night-time shots (with the policeman at the beginning, and later during the graveyard scenes) look lighter than I remembered. This may well be because of the use of “day for night” filming in the original production, but I can’t be definitive about this. Frank Collins also mentions this in his excellent review over at Cathode Ray Tube which also includes a whole load of terrific background detail about the production of the film which I couldn’t hope to cover in the same way. Some of the production detail is included in a series of extras, the majority of which are interviews with people such as Kneale’s widow Judith Kerr, Mark Gatiss, Kim Newman and Julian Glover. There are also film trailers and an episode of The World of Hammer which has a voice-over from Oliver Reed that sounds as if he recorded it in the pub next to the studio.

Quatermass and the Pit was released on Blu Ray by Optimum on 10th October 2011.